Summer Bounty? Make a Tomato Tart

This tomato tart was so good, folks, that I tried to wiggle out of having lunch with my mom and grandma in order to eat the leftovers.

I did have lunch with them, but the tart wasn’t far from my mind and is still in the fridge. It has my name on it, slated for about 11:45, my early lunch hour when I can catch the Showcase Showdown on the Price Is Right while nibbling away.

This tart is a riff on David Lebovitz’s recipe, and is really not a tart at all. I am a little terrified of making tart dough, particularly when it’s hot and humid and liable to stick. I was also interested in consuming less butter than I would have, had I made the actual tart dough and eaten a quarter of it, which was not an unlikely scenario. What I made was a modified pizza dough, like this:

Take 1 1/4 t of yeast and dissolve in 1c warm water, 5-10 minutes. Add 1.5 T melted (but not hot) butter. Add 1 c flour and a good teaspoon kosher salt and mix it all up. Add up to another cup of flour, kneading in your bowl. Knead a bit so the dough is smooth. Let sit about 15 minutes to relax.

The rest of the directions I more or less followed:

Slice a couple of big tomatoes, or a big one and a bunch of cherries, or whatever you’ve got. Push out some of the seeds so you won’t end up with soggy dough.

Grease the center of a cookie sheet–you want the tart to be about as wide as the narrow part of the sheet and the same in the other direction.

And while the size is similar, I used less cheese and had a different baking temp/time:

Press out the dough with your hands so it’s about a 14″ circle and goes over the edges of the narrow part of the pan. Smear mustard on the dough, leaving a 2″ border. Lebovitz’s tart is French and uses French mustard; I happened not to have any of that, but we did have a little jar of roasted garlic mustard that came in a Christmas Stonewall Kitchen set, so I used a couple of tablespoons of that. Layer your tomatoes on the dough. Drizzle with olive oil and some herbs; my fresh thyme outside died, so I used two pinches of dried and some fresh rosemary. Top with 4 oz of goat cheese, sliced. Fold up that two-inch border. Bake in the middle of a 400* oven for 20 minutes, then pop under the broiler, watching very carefully, to brown up the cheese a bit.

You will have no regrets making this tart with any of your precious, hoarded summer tomatoes at all. Our first yellow tomato–one of a scarce three on the vine, at risk of being mauled by a squirrel any day now–went into this, and its sweetness paired wonderfully with the mustard. This was heavenly with an IPA, but a glass of white wine would be even better.